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Friday, December 14, 2012

Book of the Week: The Gingerbread Bear

Sorry for the delay in posting the Book of the Week this week! I was home yesterday with a sick kiddo and you know how that goes!

This week's book is "The Gingerbread Bear" by Robert Dennis. I ordered this book from a recent Scholastic flyer that came home in my son's backpack. I'm glad I did, it's a great addition to my gingerbread unit! (I tried to get a link to Amazon for you, but they don't sell it yet ~ it's a 2012 release.) This version of the classic tale is remarkably similar to The Gingerbread Man by Karen Schmidt in structure and plot. The Gingerbread Bear runs away from many hungry characters: a little girl and a sweet mom, three campers, a chipmunk and a wolf. In the end, the clever ranger pretends that he cannot hear the Gingerbread Bear, drawing him closer to a dinner table. You can probably guess the ending! :)

As with the other gingerbread books I've read this month, I created pictures for my story stick using Lesson Pix:

I couldn't find icons for gingerbread bear, park ranger, or camper, but Lesson Pix makes it easy to add your own photos. We use the story stick for sequencing steps in the story and for retelling the story. Since I had all the vocabulary for this story in my "tray" on Lesson Pix, I very quickly created pattern strips and stick-puppets as well:

Pattern Strips

Were you wondering about Gingerbread Bear's poem? Here it is:

Run, run, try if you dare.

You can't catch me.

I'm the Gingerbread Bear!

I drew this Gingerbread Bear to introduce the lesson and so that kids could take turns trying to say his poem.

I work as a school based speech-language pathologist in New Bedford, MA. I work primarily with students in preschool and kindergarten. I'm also the mom of a very sweet little boy who takes up much of my free time.